Network-provided content, such as Internet web pages or media content such as video, pictures, music, and the like, are typically served to end users via networked computer systems. End user requests for the network content are processed and the content is responsively provided over various network links. These networked computer systems can include origin hosting servers which originally host network content of content creators or originators, such as web servers for hosting a news website. However, these computer systems of individual content creators can become overloaded and slow due to frequent requests of content by end users.
Content delivery networks have been developed which add a layer of caching between the origin servers of the content providers and the end users. The content delivery networks typically have one or more content nodes distributed across a large geographic region to provide faster and lower latency access to the content for the end users. When end users request content, such as a web page, which is handled through a content node, the content node is configured to respond to the end user requests instead of the origin servers. In this manner, a content node can act as a proxy for the origin servers.
Content of the origin servers can be cached into the content nodes, and can be requested via the content nodes from the origin servers of the content originators when the content has not yet been cached. Content nodes usually cache only a portion of the original source content rather than caching all content or data associated with an original content source. The content nodes can thus maintain only recently accessed and most popular content as cached from the original content sources. Thus, content nodes exchange data with the original content sources when new or un-cached information is requested by the end users or if something has changed in the original content source data.
However, various slowdowns and latency problems in content nodes can exist due to components and software included in the content nodes, such as data storage using spinning hard disk drives, poor management of caching processes, and slow handling of changes to the original content and content configurations. Other slowdowns and latency problems exist due to the capabilities of the end user devices that are accessing content from the content nodes.